A Method to Determine Angle Kappa via Automated Shape Recognition from Surgical Images

The identification and compensation of angle kappa is crucial for the centration of the operative zone in corneal refractive surgeries, such as the prevalent Small Incision Lenticule Extraction (SMILE) surgery. However, SMILE still relies on the surgeons' subjective estimation rather than the precise measurement to compensate for the angle kappa. This may expose potential issues in prior studies of the centration technique in SMILE as well as affect actual surgical outcomes. Therefore, we have developed a method to identify angle kappa based on the surgical machine VisuMax with image recognition with computer vision techniques.